Comments ( 47 )

• I would guess that Chicago is retaining more of it’s families for a longer period of time. This could be a much more recent phenomenon not yet reflected in census data.

  Anyone walking around Lakeview (especially Southport Corridor), Roscoe Village, Lincoln Square, Ravenswood, Andersonville etc… today on a sunny weekday or weekend will be overrun by strollers.

  I’d imagine even Lincoln Park has spiked as well with Lincoln Elementary, Latin and Francis Parker all stuffed to the gills.

  People are still getting out of the city when their kids hit a certain age, but I feel they stay longer than 5 and 10 years ago.

  I think the story missed out on one important aspect. It’s not just having the city become “family friendly” with amenities, parks and programs that will keep families around.

  It’s the space for the money when trying to stay close to the various city centers and downtown. You have to come up with about $400K to live east of Western Ave. in most cases to even consider having a bit of room when your kid starts walking.

  My wife and I have what we feel is adequate space to raise at least two kids for 5 plus years or so. More if we financially felt we could not move into a bigger place when that 5 year plan expires.

  But for most people we know with families planning to stay in their home for five or more years, we are in the smallest dwelling, only ones with no yard, no garage (just a parking space), and live in a six or more unit condo building. Most have a single family house (the exception being a small handful of city friends with kids under two years old).

  How do we get people to live in smaller dwellings when raising a family?

• To me, it’s all about the prices. It’s cheaper for me to buy a house in Oak Park (with a better school district) than it is virtually anywhere I would want to live in the city (with a shorter commute time to downtown.)

  Same can be said of LaGrange, LaGrange Park and Western Springs. You get much more for your money (bigger house, better schools, safer neighborhoods) and yet you can be downtown on the express Metra in 9 minutes.

  The challenge is the schools. Not everyone can get their kids into Latin (or can even afford that.)

  I understand your point, Eric, about raising kids in smaller spaces. But the larger spaces are available nearby for the same or cheaper prices.

• Quote: How do we get people to live in smaller dwellings when raising a family?

  Give them a tour of 90% of the rest of the world.

• This also raises the issue of why those of us who have always been here & are going to be here for the long haul should be taking seriously the demands and preferences of a demographic which has repeatedly/historically left the City when the going got tough.

  Seriously, it makes absolutely no sense to be reconfiguring the City for people who have no intention of raising families here for the most part – it explains why you have the constant friction between the older generations and the newer ones.

  Regarding the getting families to live in smaller spaces, why don’t we address the McMansion fad, and the condo units which go almost lot line to lot line, and then come back to this.

  I find the idea preposterous that raising a family in a modest SINGLE FAMILY HOUSE is some sort of over-the-top lifestyle, for a SINGLE FAMILY.

  If more people would do some rehabbing on the older buildings (which are built better then much of the cinder-split-face-block junk I’ve seen go up) and could live without the granite countertops and space-age kitchen appliances, you all could live in a normal house too.

• “Anyone walking around Lakeview (especially Southport Corridor), Roscoe Village, Lincoln Square, Ravenswood, Andersonville etc… today on a sunny weekday or weekend will be overrun by strollers.”

  You’ll always see lots of strollers and playlots in hip neighborhoods. The problem is that you never see any 12 year olds. Families move to the burbs when it’s time to send their kids to school.

• Or get rid of self-entitlement where every kid has to have his or her own room and bathroom.

• I agree with Tracey. I have always believed that I would stay in the city to raise my kids, but the economic reality of doing so in a safe neighborhood is quite stark. Places like Oak Park and Evanston, while expensvie compared to other suburbs, offer much of what the city has but for a better price. The city will struggle economically until it finds a way to keep middle class families past the point of Kindergarten.

  Carter, I’m not surprised by your feelings. You’ve always shown resentment against what you preceive as a middle class takeover of the city. The truth is that the city (and all American urban areas) need more middle-class educated residents to be economically and socially healthy. The anti-gentrification stance is truly ridiculous, espeically when you examine what happens in cities that lack gentrification! All you need to do is look at Detroit to see what happens to a city with too few upper and middle-class residents. The result is a giant ghetto of despair and limited opportunity.

• It has nothing to do with being anti-gentrification, UptownR.

  And it’s not my perception there’s a takeover of the neighborhoods with better geographic and infrastructure advantages by the more well-heeled, it’s stone cold fact, and not one I’m overgeneralizing as negative, there simply have been some negative consequences.

  it’s also more the upper middle class, if not simply the upper class – who is buying brand new construction single family homes? not anyone making less than $100K is my guess.

  What I am frustrated with is the constant bending over backwards & reinventing the wheel to accommodate the preferences of those who have no commitment to the City – the ridiculous planters, the unnecessary wrought-iron fences all over the place, etc. These things cost big bucks, and the longer people live here, the more they tend to come around the reality that the City’s priorities are completely out of whack – what’s it gonna be, subsidizing condos with TIF millions or having a functional public transportation system and schools?

  the phrase we’re dancing around is opportunity cost. money spent on fluff and on trying to wow all of these people who supposedly save us from ourselves is money not going to budgets that would actually make a difference in our day to day lives.

  good grief, just listen to yourself – you are talking about leaving the city to find a better place to raise your kids. why on earth should I be listening to you when it comes to the future of the City for families?

  You think that addressing concerns of the blue collar and the lower/middle half of the middle-class bell curve is going to turn Chicago into a burned-out ghetto? Ridiculous.

• “Or get rid of self-entitlement where every kid has to have his or her own room and bathroom.”

  thank you, exactly. my brother & I had bunkbeds and one bathroom for all of us.

  somehow, we managed to survive without resorting to joining street gangs or pillaging the neighborhood, I find it a complete and utter strawman argument to claim that not catering to millionaire lifestyles will turn Chicago into East St. Louis.

  it’s these materialistic values that are driving the McMansions, the massive units that leave no space for sunlight or air circulation from windows, no yards, etc., the replacement of mom and pops with lousy chain stores (the irony of people going to Chipotle when real mexican restaurants are right on the same street), etc.

  You want a boring, strip-mall lifestyle and a huge house? Stay in the burbs.

• Carter, you are so full of it I can’t even take you seriously. I didn’t say I was going to leave the city when my kids hit Kindergarten age–I said the economic realities of raising kids in a safe part of the city are stark, and that the appeal of nearby suburbs is real and understandable.

  Families in the city are largely becoming two groups: 1. People who have the money to send their kids to private schools and hire nannies, and 2. People who have no other choice but to stay in poverty-ridden areas. The “working class” is still leaving the city faster than ever and the “middle class” just can’t make ends meet here. It’s not just housing and space issues… Have you ever looked at daycare costs or private school tuition? Some of the CPS schools have improved at the grade school level, but the real estate in those neighborhoods is astronomical.

  The city is still in economic danger because of the fleeing middle class. The Detroit example may be a bit extreme, but you’re really ignorant to think that you can ignore this problem. Also, your attacks on the urban beautification projects is equally puzzling. It is very important to keep Chicago economically viable compared to the suburbs, and encouraging investment and visits to the city for shopping/tourism is a big part of this!

• Carter, I agree with your take on McMansions, strip malls, and the banality of urban sprawl, however. And the cheaply constructed ugly condo problem as well.

• UptownR,

  don’t you realize Carter is “real”. Everyone else is merely a wannabee. They don’t count.

  He pines for the “Lake View” of his misspent “yout”. While many now are unreal by typing “Lakeview”. Oh, Gawd, I so love picking on Carter. It is like taking candy from a child. Only less embarrassing.

  Now there are increasing numbers of new residents in “gentrifying” hoods staying and raising their kids here. The percentage seems to be small but increasing. I’ve noticed larger numbers of “evil yuppie” spawn in Lakeview, LP, and greater Ravenswood. Even in Uptown. It is surprising to find school age yuppettes walking the streets.

  As for “reconfiguring” the city for those who have no intention of staying……..I got news for you Carter the Martyr……..those folks pay a disproportionate amount of property and other taxes so you can wax philosophical. They really don’t use much in terms of services. No kids in school means no taxes to pay for the kids in school. Planters and wrought iron while expensive are not nearly as expensive as schools.

  As for the transit crisis that rightfully belongs on the back of “da mare”. The CTA has been and is still run as a big patronage haven. Most of those patronage workers are long time city residents. Not that it matters, but it seems amusing to make the comparison to your “real” city devotees. Daley also concentrated on the “big bucks” projects instead of the necessary day to day maintenance.

  Now the whole pattern of people moving to the city after college, getting married, having spawn, staying a few years and them moving to the burbs is simply a fact. There are good aspects to it and bad. I don’t happen to like a suburban lifestyle, but most people do. That is their choice.

  I don’t think it is necessarily the right choice or even a good choice for the nation. I would love to see the cities and inner ring suburbs rebuilt. I would love to see people biking, walking and using public transportation. I would love if Angelina Jolie would leave Brad Pitt and shack up with me. It ain’t gonna happen.

  The economy of the 1970’s where people could walk to work at the bakery or small factory is largely gone. The city of your youth is gone. The city of my youth is further gone. The city is constantly changing. That is the one constant. It either changes for the better or it can get worse. Right now the jury is out on the city as a whole. As for the north side neighborhoods. They are clearly improving overall. Perhaps not to Carter the Martyr but to me. Like him I claim to be the only voice that counts.

  IrishPirate “Born in Chicago, The only “real” voice of Chicago”. The rest of you suck.

• Chicago is one Mayor away from becoming Detroit. Just read American Pharoah! Bilandic, Byrne and Washington inherited a similar mess from the original Midas. So what is it going to be, Sandi Jackson or Tom Dart in 2011?

• It’s gonna be Daley in 2011. Barring federal indictment or death he will likely run. I expect him to die in office sometimes in the 2020’s.

• The schools are largely a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop. The won’t improve until they get more pupils who aren’t in poverty. But they won’t get those students until they improve. Funding is only one part of the problem.

  Now the CTA is an entirely different issue. I’d like to see CTA funding doubled–espeically in the capital improvements budget. A lot of the operating budget could be streamlined if they had newer equipment and infrastructure that required less maintenance. The guys with the clipboards who check the bus routes could be eliminated with GPS, etc.

• The Mommy Monsters have already ruined Lincoln Park and Lakeview. What more accommodation do they want? Is it too much to ask to be able to walk into a Starbucks without having the entry blocked by an SUV stroller?

• Sometimes the suburbs are cheaper and they have better school options.

  For example, if you live in West Wilmette, you can get a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house for as low as the 370s. Along with this, you live in a friendly neighborhood and have access to some of the best schools in the country.

  I would say for the money you are spending in the city, might as well have it got farther in a suburb that is 20 minutes from downtown. From a financial standpoint, Wilmette is a better deal than living in a not so great neighborhood for the same price, just so that you can live in the city.

• Sorry, I meant “go farther”, not “got farther”.

• Well, I’m not going to make any generalizations or personal attacks, but this IS an interesting point. Carter wrote as follows

  “What I am frustrated with is the constant bending over backwards & reinventing the wheel to accommodate the preferences of those who have no commitment to the City.. ”

  It’s an interesting thought. Daley has spent a lot of money on things that have been criticized as being superficial that appeal to the upper-middle class, and it’s made a lot of developers a lot of money.

  I disagree, however, that the new residents will all move.

  Another way of looking at it is that he’s rewarding the group that will continue to enrich the city in tangible, real ways. Daley is making a conscious decision to take steps which raise the median income of Chicago. He will continue the trend of magnet schools in the North Side.

  I’ll get flamed for this, but I would argue anything else would be money down the drain.

• What I wanted in the way of “school reform” was a natural continuation of the LSC system. Namely, an ELECTED School Board, resopnsible directly to the voters/citizens and, presumably, the parents of the kids whose education these ELECTED OFFICIALS would be responsible for!

  What did we get instead? An arrogant power play that simply replaced one appointed School Board with another one. Only this time it’s the mayor’s lapdogs comprising the Board, instead of at least a semi-independent collection of public servants.

  Am I the only one who suspects that the improvements that have taken place in our schools would have taken place anyway, without the change in management, under the direction of LSCs instead of the mayor’s cronies?

• Discussion of quality of life issues in the city at some point always gets back to our bad government. Families develop ways to cope with inconveniences, but there is no escape from the pervasive stench in the air. It ain’t going away not even with a different mayor. In my opinion, when it comes to middle class family retention, Chicago is permanently handicapped.

• pk,

  We have to remove the stench by removing from office every current officeholder and not electing anyone who has ever held public office before or is related to anyone who has ever held public office before or who has had a state or local government job for more than 5 years.

  An entirely new group then needs to clean house thoroughly. There are enough talented, committed civil servants to keep the government functioning through a massive turnover, and more talented people would be attracted from around the country by the chance to see what this city could do with the immense assets that it has.

  It’s doable if enough concerned people get involved and are willing to risk and endure the pain that the current pack of slime would doubtless visit on them before the election.

• When I have children I won’t raise them in the city, although I wish I could. The fact of the matter is that it is too expensive and not convenient to do so. The neighborhoods where I would want to live with other people like me are very expensive and unaffordable to many people. The affordable units in ‘nicer’ neighborhoods tend to be 2 bedroom condos in or maybe 3 bedrooms around 1000 square feet. Not designed or suitable for a family of 4 or 5. If you want your children to attend college don’t bother sending them to a public high school. 6% of freshmen fail to earn a bachelors within 10 years of entry into high school (from last year’s Trib article). In my experience the junior highs suck too. I live in a nice neighborhood and the junior high next to my apartment building is far from ideal. I wouldn’t suggest you send your children there unless you want their classmates to be under-achieving and from poverty ridden areas. The locals with any disposable income whatsoever send their children to the private junior high a few blocks away. Don’t count on sending your kid to a magnet school either. Last year there were 14,000 applicants for 1,300 positions, an acceptance rate to only the Ivy League can compare. And did I mention living in the City is expensive? Food is more expensive, gas is more expensive, private schools are expensive, taxes are higher, having a car is more expensive, entertainment is more expensive, parking must be paid for (unlike the suburbs). I love this city and I moved here 12 years ago…I was still 17 before I entered college. I dread the day I return to the ‘burbs but it is a necessary evil. I cannot afford to raise children here and expect to maintain a higher standard of living. I can’t afford to live in Lincoln Park or Lakeview or Roscoe Village and raise a family. I’m more likely to live in portage park or logan square, which are far from ideal or anywhere near the way I grew up. And there is no way my children will be attending a public school where a majority of the children and teenagers in the area are poor and/or raised in the street. I don’t think I’m overgeneralizing either. I want my children to be raised in an environment where people are more like me. The suburbs has that feel to it where portage park or avondale doesn’t. Maybe I’ll a classist snob but these sorts of things are important to me, and apparently to hundreds of thousands of other people too. In the end, my children (when I have them) will be going to high school in Palos or Mundelein or Buffalo Grove, as opposed to Shurz or Lane or Clemente.

• Odujoko,

  There’s nothing classist or snobbish about wanting your children to grow up in a safe environment and get a good educaton.

  The classist snobs are more likely to be the folks who question anyone’s choice to move to the suburbs for their children’s sake.

• We need a critical mass of middle-class parents in the city before we can turn the public schools into something viable… But it’s easy to say that, and hard to pioneer it with your own kids. I don’t want to experiment with mine!

  I find much of the Nortwest side to be lacking. Places like Oak Park and Evanston arguably offer a more “urban” lifestyle than Portage Park or Jefferson Park. The density is higher in parts of evanston, the pedestrian-friendly businesses are more plentiful and concentrated, the “L” and Metra allow for a good existence without a car, and they are frankly more diverse than many city neighborhoods. I can see how these towns offer great appeal to urban enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Porage Park and Jefferson Park are really automobile-centered neighborhoods!

  I see three major choices for me as my kids get older:

  (1) Get a larger condo in a desirable city neighborhood and just choke down the private school costs.

  (2) Live in a SF house in a less desirable neighborhood, choke down the private school costs, and hate my life.

  (3) Live in Oak Park or Evanston and send my kids to private schools. This would be more affordable, and frankly offers a less drastic lifestyle change than moving to some city neighborhood I’m not crazy about.

  I honestly only see options 1 and 3 being viable, so the choice becomes bigger condo in the city verses a SF home in Oak Park (Evanston seems to be slipping away from my affordability, so I’d be in a condo there too).

• Oops, I meant to say “public schools” in my Option 3 above.

• Uptownr,

  Consider adding Wilmette to your option 3 list – just as affordable, if you look around, as Oak Park and Evanston, but with far better schools. Public transportation is good, and there are some walkable neighborhoods. Your kids will love it.

• Uptown, the overgeneralization and anecdotal evidence that this displays is mind-boggling:

  “I said the economic realities of raising kids in a safe part of the city are stark, and that the appeal of nearby suburbs is real and understandable.

  Families in the city are largely becoming two groups”

  Two groups, right. Did you buy all that red state/blue state nonsense as well? Come on man, Chicago is so much more diverse than that, you just don’t know the people who are rolling with the challenges like people always have, I know large numbers of people who wouldn’t be caught dead moving to the suburbs – we might move to a small town, but urban sprawl? no thanks. What is your experience living in Chicago neighborhoods, anyway?

  “As for the north side neighborhoods. They are clearly improving overall. Perhaps not to Carter the Martyr but to me. Like him I claim to be the only voice that counts.”

  LOL, your voice may count on the Sout’ Side, but you defected to enemy territory and you lost your rank when you did so. I sentence you to 3 home Sox games wearing a Sammy Sosa jersey.

  IP is only partially right that there is improvement – the CTA most certainly is the glaring example of infrastructure Hizzoner has neglected sorely (Chicago contributes $3 million to the CTA while raking in over $100 million a year with TIFs? puh-leeze.)

  Joe is more right that any improvement is being billed to us at many times its face value. That might fly in boom times, but it sure isn’t now. When Daley finally goes, then we’ll see what Chicago does, that’s the main event, politically speaking.

  Carter aka “the voice of reason”

• I love when people say “When I have kids, I will do such and such, I’d like to do such and such, etc…”. Just wait.

  There are so many good points made above and it goes to show you how hard decisions become when you have a kid in the city.

  Tracey… LaGrange! Nearby!! Western Springs… where the hell is that? 9 minutes my ass. Look, if your lifestyle is tied to a Metra train in and out of the City, fine. That can work for you. But it’s not even close to the same as living IN the city. My wife and I both work in the city… as you may know, I work all over the city. My wife works in Lincoln Park, not downtown.

  When you get away from working near the Metra hubs downtown, that commute can become an issue. Plus, it isn’t always cheap and easy to get a walkable neighborhood, by the Metra and have an easy commute downtown. Other issues avalanche on you: child care, friends, family, professional and social life. These things will become harder for my wife and I out of the city.

  We’re in it to win it here.

  Look, we just like the people, free stuff, community, the “club” that is having a city kid. I grew up equal parts suburbs and city. And I loved some of the suburb stuff. But these days, its not like you can let your kid go running off in the morning and he/she comes back at dinner.
  Those days are gone, I imagine. So we feel we have just as much of a network here to keep the kids busy and getting from place to place.

  Plus, to my wife and I the burbs means driving more. And, we drive enough as it is.

  That said, see you in Evanston or Wilmette in 6 years or so. But I’ll still have to plunk $500-600K or so down to get a move-in house near a truly “walkable” neighborhood with good schools.

• Alex, please read
  “People are still getting out of the city when their kids hit a certain age, but I feel they stay longer than 5 and 10 years ago.”

  As well someone’s 12 year olds are filling up the schools in the neighborhoods I mention above.

  thanks

• Eric R.-

  I, too am amused by co-workers’ claims that their suburban commute on Metra is 10-20 minutes.

  Maybe…MAYBE the time the train is actually moving is 15-20 minutes… on an express. But they never seem to figure in the drive/walk to the station, then the bus ride/hike to the office. And that’s of course if they’re on the express. And there’s always the ride home, where if you work late and miss a specific train you have to wait another hour for the next one.

  I live in Printer’s Row and work in River North. And it takes me a MINIMUM of 20 minutes, if all the CTA gods smile on me, to get to or from work. Usually more.

• The “two groups” mentioned above were after a caveat of “largely becoming”. I stand by that statement. This is the trend. Of course there are tens of thousands of exceptions in a city as large as Chicago, but the trend is toward a greater disparity between high income and low income in the city, and the middle class is being squeezed. Of course, people making $250,000 a year and living in a $850,000 North Center home love to think they’re “middle class”, but this is really not the case.

  I do have a kid, and I live in the city. I’ve always thought that I would stay in the city to raise kids through high school, and I’ll likely still do it. But my middle-class income is really being pushed to it’s limits, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold out, even though it’s what I really want to do. It was easier for people who had kids ten years ago before the rise of real estate prices, but my two-bed one-bath condo is going to get small really fast once my kids get older!

  I bring up Oak Park and Evanston because they are still on the “L”, have large areas that are urban and walkable, offer much diversity, and have good schools. Wilmette is not on my radar. The schools may have higher test scores, but it’s just not diverse enough for me–and it’s a bit too suburban. And if you look more closely at the test scores in Evanston and Oak Park, you’ll see that the white middle and upper class students actually do extraordinarily well there (the disparity is another issue entirely, but it does show that “good schools” are more subjective than just comparing test scores).

• Carter will be in for a shock if and when he has kids… The Chicago of his youth doesn’t exist anymore. People can rarely raise families on a single income, and daycare costs are out of control. Carter, did you know that the nice Concordia daycare over there in Avondale costs $1300 a month for an infant and has a waiting list with hundreds of people on it? Want something close to work in the Loop? Try $1600 a month or more. A Nanny? The cheap ones in the city seem to be about $15/hour plus taxes. These are North Side/Loop working realities, and there are probably other options on the South Side. But these are the “stark economic realities” I speak of.

• the stark reaction to those realities is 2 working parents.

  and our day care provider is about $28 a day, my mom and my wife’s mom each take a day watching our daughter, so we’re saving now in the case a magnet isn’t doable and we decide to go private – but the point is there are lots and lots of options, just takes some work to find what will work for you.

  so put that in your pipe and smoke it, we’re survivors and not going anywhere – and we got in on Avondale Concordia’s list long before they even opened, so we’re good there as well.

• $28 a day? I don’t believe it. I haven’t seen anything even close to this and I’ve been looking for years. A Puerto Rican friend of mine who grew up in Humboldt Park is paying more than that, and he’s got a neighborhood lady from the ‘hood watching his daughter. Even the crappy Uptown daycares cost more than that.

• believe what you want, shoot me an email & I’d be happy to pass on the number, she’s fantastic and our daughter loves her.

• Another dynamic being overlooked: we’re building new multifamily because that’s where the demand is. Household sizes are shrinking fast, as the Boomers age into senior citizenship and the Boomlet moves out into their own apartments.

  Land is a scarce resource. If you want to use it inefficiently — e.g., for single family houses — then you have to be prepared to pay extra.

  As for OP & Evanston, the prices are lower but the taxes are much higher.

• that’s an incomplete assessment of the dynamic.

  every time I drive out of Chicago I see more and more single family homes – huge ones – in urban sprawl fill in. Chicago’s sprawl goes into southern Wisconsin, Indiana, and well into what used to be flood plains in the middle of the state.

  land isn’t the scarce resource, working infrastructure is – there’s pleny of land, but Trump isn’t going to build giant luxury towers outside of Aurora or in Naperville.

  The USA is low density by almost every international standard – the difference here is that people want to exploit the existing and aging urban infrastructure while continuing the hypocritical sprawl and low-density growth elsewhere.

• OP’s and Evanston’s taxes aren’t THAT much higher than Chicago’s. You’ll still come out ahead if you factor in private school tuition in the city for just ONE child. And if you have multiple children, it’s a much better deal.

  I’m still trying to find that CPS elementary school with somewhat affordable 3BR condos or houses nearby… Bell and Nettlehorst have attendance boundaries with pricey real estate.

• Again, you can buy a dump in an “okay” school district in a “sort of” walkable location in Evanston for $550K with higher taxes than Chicago’s, say, Norwood Park. It’s not a cut and dry decision.

  Taxes are a lot higer in Evanstion. For a re-sale 3000 sq/ft home, I commonly see Evanston taxes at 12K and chicago from 7K to 10K.

  You get much more house in a Norwood Park by the “L”…with a good school for a lot cheaper than Evanston. Not saying I’m moving there…but you’ll get less attitude as well. Take that Evanston.

• I’m finding a lot of my friends with kids are moving to Portage Park, although I can’t say I know much about schools one way or the other.

• You saw my opinion of Portage Park above… Many inner-ring suburbs offer a better urban experience, but I do love the bungalows there. I just wish there was more to walk to. Every time I’m tempted to move to Portage Park I visit the neighborhood, and then I remember why I don’t like it.

• you do of course realize the utter hilarity of a sentence reading: “Many inner-ring suburbs offer a better urban experience.”

  I know what you mean, but, it’s still funny.

• Carter, I said “another dynamic,” “another” being indefinite rather than definite. Our society, and by extension our cities and metropolises, are far too complex and fluid to be determined by a single dynamic, or even by a readily comprehendible set of forces. I truly appreciate your enthusiasm and curiosity, but the world’s much more complicated (and interesting) than that.

  Fact: nationally, attached housing now sells at a premium to detached housing. Fact: in most major metros, including Chicago, attached housing accounts for more than half of new housing sales. There’s considerable, growing, and believe it or not underserved market demand for denser, smaller houses — that doesn’t mean that single family houses won’t be built, or that sprawl has stopped. It will take decades to turn around that beast.

• You still don’t really have a point – just because singles are looking for housing doesn’t discount the fact that when comes time to raise a family, people opt for more space anda place for their kids to play besides the hallway of a condo complex.

  And of course the world is too complicated to narrow anything as complicated as demographic shifts to single causes – that’s why your facts are rather futile, nationwide trends, citywide trends, so what?

  the title here was cities need to become family friendly- if you think shoehorning people into shared-wall cinderblock construction is the route to keeping families, you’ll have to do better than the argument presented so far.

• When did I say that “shoehorning people into shared-wall cinderblock construction is the route to keeping families”? The point about multifamily’s growing market share is a rebuttal to Kotkin’s single-minded emphasis that cities must privilege families above all others, when in fact many cities may do better to play to their comparative advantage (e.g., singles and couples). Rebutting Kotkin is part of my job.

  Of course housing preferences shift when people move through life stages. They might not shift to the extent you assume (and extrapolate) from your own experience, though: the new grade school at Lakeshore East won’t serve many kids who have side yards at home.

  For those who “need” a single family, there are millions of detached houses already out there for the taking. No, most of them aren’t within a short walk of cute shopping streets, but that’s because cute shopping streets generally require high densities (or the importation of lots of customers) to survive.

  Hopefully, developers will see that there’s a niche here and begin asking their architects for more rowhouses, stacked townhouses, and other more family-friendly, “ground related” multifamily housing types. (Some cities have started requiring such designs.)

• Some suburbs are more “urban” than city neighborhoods. And some city neighborhoods are more “suburban” that suburbs. I use the term the way it was discussed in my planning classes and archtiecture studios… Where “urban” refers more to the built conditions than municipal boundaries.